Benefits of Joining InCommon

• Higher security: Policy-driven methods, using strong authorization controls over secure access channels, provide a higher-level security. This higher level also provides a secure mechanism for ensuring privacy in the exchange of identity and authorization attributes.
  
• Provide a standard conduit for collaboration: The Federation acts as a collection point and conduit for those wishing to provide and gain access to collaborative web based resources. Using a standard mechanism for connecting to this conduit provides economies of scale by reducing or removing the need to repeat integration work for each new collaborative work.
  
• Reduced account overhead: Account creation and management can be reduced for resource consumers who are not affiliated with the institution offering those resources. As a federation member, these resources are made available to other federation members who are responsible for managing those accounts.
  
• Economies of scale for contractual agreements: Some or all of the policy and legal requirements for bilateral agreements between institutions for sharing of resources may be consolidated by or leveraged from the Federation policies, agreements and requirements documents. This could minimize the need or scope of multiple relying party agreements.
  
• More granular control over access to and auditing of online resource distribution: Institutions currently offering resources restricted by IP address or other gross controls will be able use authorization decisions to enforce more granular control for the distribution of cost based resources. The results of which lead to a more consistent accounting of which resources are actually being utilized and by whom.

End-User Benefits

• Ease user account management: Users no longer have to manage an array of accounts and passwords.
  
• Privacy maintained: Users identify themselves locally with their home institution, then pass only relevant and necessary attributes to the resource, maintaining privacy as necessary.
  
• Convenience and security: Single sign-on reduces opportunities for accounts to be compromised and also allows users to access any number of resources while signing on only once.

Administrator Benefits

• Integrate new users, services, and resource providers faster and easier
  
• Reduce need for per-service account provisioning
  
• Extend existing identity-management and resource services
  
• Create layers of federation for various constituencies and consortia

Return on Investment

The Swedish virtual organization SWAMI (Swedish Alliance for Middleware Infrastructure) has demonstrated how federated identity management can lower the costs of identity proofing [pdf]. In addition to the write-up, SWAMI has provided a spreadsheet used to determine the per-student cost [xls]of identity proofing.

Benefits for SPs

Are you a Sponsored Partner or potential Sponsored Partner? You'll find a page listing the benefits along with a short screen-capture video, plus links to additional resources.

Need Help?

Do limits on time, resources, or expertise have you stymied? Several companies provide either consulting or turn-key solutions for either identity management or federated IdM, or both. InCommon Affiliates support the federation and have expertise and solutions that you may find valuable.